Sir Tim Berners-Lee
1. Sir Timothy ("Tim") John Berners-Lee, is the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its continued development.
Berners-Lee was born in London, the son of Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents, who were both mathematicians, were employed together on the team that built the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers. Berners-Lee attended Emanuel School in Wandsworth. He is an alumnus of Queen's College, Oxford University, where he built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. While at Oxford, he was caught hacking with a friend and was subsequently banned from using the university computer.
2. He worked at Plessey Telecommunications Limited in 1976 as a programmer, and in 1978, he worked at the D.G. Nash Limited where he did typesetting software and an operating system.
He is now living in the Boston, Massachusetts area with his wife and two children.
3. In 1980, while an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. With help from Robert Cailliau he built a prototype system named Enquire.
4. After leaving CERN in 1980 to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd., he returned in 1984 as a fellow. By 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser, editor and Web server, called httpd (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon).
5. The first Web site built was at http://info.cern.ch/ and was first put online on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could own a browser and how to set up a Web server. It was also the world's first Web directory.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various companies willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Internet. Many of the World Wide Web Consortium's achievements are able to be seen in many Web sites on the Internet.
6. The University of Southampton was the first to recognize Berners-Lee's contribution to developing the World Wide Web with an honorary degree in 1996 and he is currently a Chair of Computer Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science department, and is a Senior Research Scientist there. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2002, the British public named him among the 100 Greatest Britons of all time.
On July 21, 2004 he was presented with an Honorary Doctor of Science (honoris causa) from Lancaster University. On January 27, 2005 he was named Greatest Briton of 2004 for his achievements as well as displaying the key British characteristics of "diffidence, determination, a sharp sense of humour and adaptability" as put by David Hempleman-Adams.